The emote and meme “Pogchamp” has been popular on twitch ever since its first appearance in 2017, and it was submitted to be an official Twitch emote then. Now, with the introduction of the new surprised expression on the face of Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez, co-founder of Cross Counter TV, it has become more popular than ever.

However, Guiterrez encouraged violence after the vandalism in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 through a twitter post with the tag #MAGAmartyr that called for more civil unrest for a Trump supporter that died during the riot.

After this tweet, Twitch’s executives removed Gooteck’s face from the emote and are now using a new policy for it. They will replace the Guiterrez’s face with a different “surprised expression” every single day.

“I know [Guiterrez] is undeserving of holding such a valuable emote, but the emoji and what it symbolizes is quite separate from the face in it. Fortunately, Twitch’s new PogChamp program where they rotate new faces each day is an adequate replacement for me. It’s interesting and unique, and it retains the hype the original emote exuded,”  sophomore Brian Lai, a Twitch streamer said.

Even if the loss of the popular emote was mourned by many of its users, once they understood the reasoning behind the change, they applauded Ttwitch’s decisions to replace it.

“Even if the emoji is unrelated to politics, the face of somebody that still encourages violence should not remain in our popular culture. Twitch replacing the face of ‘Pogchamp’ is most definitely the right decision,”  sophomore Abhinav Angirekula said.

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